Race and historiography: Advancing a critical-realist approach.

Abstract

This scholarly essay interrogates the seemingly necessary engagement of normative and essentialist characterizations of identity in the historical study of race in U.S. higher education.The author's study of the experiences of Black collegians in private, liberal arts colleges in the Midwestern Great Lakes region between 1945 and 1965 grounds this discussion. Although engaging racial essentialism is necessary, the author presents alternative treatments of historicizing race to illustrate the benefits of a critical-realist approach to producing a synthetic cultural educational history.

Historicising Cultural Sport Psychology: Dare we De-centre Methodological Eurocentrism?

“…These antagonist positions had also informed much of the CSP work, which had contributed to dismantling essentialism as outdated and turned to theorising that emphasises language and fluidity in the construction of cultural identities. For Mohanty (1993) and others (Alcoff, 2000;Moya, 2000Moya, , 2009Stewart, 2017), the danger is that by rejecting essentialism in favour of radical scepticism, our theories reduce various identities to nothing but discourse. Drawing on minority discourses and focusing on issues of gender identity, Mohanty (1993) proposed that identities 'work' like other theories, offering us more or less adequate knowledge about our situation in the world.…”

Envisioning Possibilities for Innovations in Higher Education Research on Race and Ethnicity

“…First, fifth-wave race and ethnicity scholarship could consider contextual and temporal intrapersonal and interpersonal conceptions, performances, and articulations of race and ethnicity. As Stewart (2017a) has demonstrated, race is not static; its meanings have changed over time. Moreover, student-centered meanings and purposes of being racially minoritized on campus have evolved (Stewart, 2017b).…”

Whiteness as Collective Memory in Student Publications at Midwestern Liberal Arts Colleges, 1945–1965

“…Those aware of White supremacy’s legacy and material effects may suspect that the racial climate and campus experiences of these students would be hostile as most facets of Black people’s lives were lived apart from Whites (Wilkerson, 2010). However, a critical-realist analysis as discussed by Stewart (2017d) serves to push such interpretations further by foregrounding the settler-colonialism that enabled the development of these institutions (e.g., Wilder, 2013). Furthermore, the settler-colonial infrastructure portrays a deep investment in whiteness as an ontological and epistemic orientation (Smith, 2012) that centers White cultural norms and expectations in its definitions of reality and what counts as knowledge.…”

“…Nevertheless, such an identification method as used in this study is vulnerable to biological essentialism, especially by failing to include fair-skinned and mixed-race students who would have been classified as Black due to the one-drop rule created during the chattel slavery period in the United States Despite race not being rooted in biology, chattel slavery in the United States used genetic traits and heredity to create racial classifications based on phenotypical details such as the hair texture, melanin content in the skin, and the shape and width of the nose to maintain a fiction of White racial purity and, at the same time, keep the slave economy supplied with its labor force (Alexander, 2010; Lee, 1993; Kendi, 2016). However, the absence of alumni data categorized by race for matriculates of this era at most of these colleges necessitated this approach (see also Stewart, 2017d). For Denison, Earlham, Oberlin, Kalamazoo, Ohio Wesleyan, and Wabash, I was able to mitigate this vulnerability by cross-referencing my lists culled from the yearbooks with the alumni offices’ lists of Black alumni.…”

“…None of these colleges had official policies that admitted to the likely racial exclusion and isolation that Black matriculates would encounter on campus. Evidence of this was only apparent through the use of a critical-realist racial lens (Stewart, 2017d) that took into account both the social construction of race and its material effects as an epistemic reality.…”